Hi. It appears that join doesn't ignore trailing whitespace, resulting in surprising results. I'm attaching two data files. one is the output of 'seq 5', and the other is the same thing, but with a trailing space added to each line. Look: dima@scrawny:~$ join -j 1 -e - -o auto /tmp/dat.no.trailing.space /tmp/dat.no.trailing.space 1 2 3 4 5 dima@scrawny:~$ join -j 1 -e - -o auto /tmp/dat.trailing.space /tmp/dat.trailing.space 1 - - 2 - - 3 - - 4 - - 5 - - I guess the manpage isn't explicit about what happens in this case, but as a user, I find this to be extremely surprising, and this thus feels like a bug. Thanks. (I'm not subscribed to the list, so please Cc me in replies)